QR Fall 2002
Case 3, Homework 1
Locating your hometown
- Locate the tract,
county, and metropolitan statistical area (MSA) for your hometown/
neighborhood at the US Census http://www.census.gov.
There is a button that will take you directly to Factfinder on the
left of the Census homepage. Alternatively you could go directly to the
tract locator in Factfinder
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/
BasicFactsServlet.
- Enter a street address
where asked in the top left-hand side of the Factfinder home page.
Make a note of the tract number, county, and the metropolitan statistical
area of your address.
- Play with the mapping
feature to map your tract, county, and MSA to get a sense of how they
interact geographically. You might want to print them to keep, although
the image resolution is not very high. You could also map some of the
other geographical divisions that the tract locator provides (urban areas,
blocks, counties, congressional districts…its all here!).
- Using Factfinder,
identify the racial and ethnic composition of your census tract, county,
MSA, and state. Specifically:
i.
Go
to the Datasets panel on the Factfinder homepage and select 2000
Summary File 1 which provides complete geographic detail to the block
level.
ii.
On
this next page, select the “Detailed Tables” option from the right hand menu
iii.
Then
navigate through the menus provided to find information for your tract, MSA,
and county. Below is a shorthand summary of the census geographical categories
and how they relate to each other. For specific data tables, select P1. Total
Population, P3. Race and P4. Hispanic Origin
iv.
Fill
in the attached table
